Demystifying Agent Skills: Why They Work-Until They Don't

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.14036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skills have emerged as a practical and effective approach for enhancing LLM agents at inference time through structured packages of knowledge. However, existing evaluations largely measure whether skills improve aggregated task success, leaving a more fundamental question underexplored: \emph{\textbf{When do skills help, why do they work, and where do they fail?}} Through controlled experiments across various benchmarks, agent harnesses and LLMs, w